This is my rambling recording of what we’re doing so if you aren’t interested in the details of our schooling feel free to pop over to a more interesting place for the remainder of this post!

This one has some interesting things to debate:Opposing Views

Still here?? Cool! Let’s go!

Fall Piano Lessons have started and Jr. has a surprise for his teacher in a few weeks. I gave him a “fun” piece to work on in amongst all his lesson pieces. He’s having a ball with the simple arrangement of Vivaldi’s Spring from the Four Seasons. I think that his teacher will get quite a kick out of hearing him play it when it is a bit more polished. I anticipate that he’ll select it as a recital piece for Winter Recital.

In math Jr. continues to go forth and conquer big numbers. But he’s also been refreshing his memory of the simple math facts with his speed races. Which he’s getting faster at. I’ve started him out with 5 minutes but he’s easily within that time and he’s been racing the clock at Math Magician too.

Handwriting, Copywork and Journalling are all being completed easily. I’m still reminding him to make all his letters lowercase except where Uppercase is needed. And he’s still making lots and lots of his letters from the bottom. I can’t decide if that is actually a problem or not?! His printing is legible even if he’s starting the letter at the bottom.

Grammar Rock makes grammar so much fun! I still love Growing with Grammar and so does Jr. We’ve moved into Verbs now and the concept of tense. We’ve talked about irregular verbs and linking verbs. And we’ve hit past and present tense for those types of verbs. Schoolhouse Rock’s Grammar Rock is just a fun addition to our learning!

In Science we are leaving the animal kingdom for a few weeks to study weather. I think this will be a good change up. We spent several weeks talking Arthropods what with our butterflies, spiders and pill bugs. We’re a little bugged out at the moment so now is a great time to switch gears for a bit. We’ll return to the animal kingdom in late October with a review of Cnidarians! This last week we finished the Arthropod page for our Animal Kingdom Book and had hopes to do the final pill bug lab. Unfortunately our toad seems to have eaten most of our pill bugs that were housed in the same tank. Oops! We may return to that last lab next summer just for fun.

In History we briefly visited Charlemagne. He wasn’t very interesting to the boys so we are leaving him and his strict rule to visit with those book writing Monks of the Middle Ages. The SOTW discs continue to be a big hit with the kids though we’ve listened to the story of Beowolf about a dozen times. I jumped to the Monk chapters this week and we’ll be here in history for another week yet!

I started our American History picture book review this last week too! More on that next time though as we’re only half way through our first picture book that has a lot of words! I guess that makes it really more of an illustrated book than a picture book!
See you next time!